General Social Care Council ‘must be saved’ – Nick Johnson

The agency was created to place greater value on the people who work with the vulnerable. It should not be lost because of a wobbly beginning, says Nick Johnson

When new governments begin to rationalise the structures of their forebears, quangos are always top of the list. This usually precedes a point where the administration realises it cannot cope without a specialist body to deliver some aspect of policy, giving birth to its own crop of quangos. Some are political creations, hardly recognised in life and hardly noticed as they disappear.

The General Social Care Council (GSCC) does not qualify at all under this heading. Its creation was to register social care workers and to regulate their conduct and training. The work took about 25 years and passed between several governments, facing varying levels of reluctance until New Labour allowed it into the Care Standards Act 2000.

The sector always aspired to have similar recognition for its workforce as the health service. It rightly believed that raising the standard of the growing social care workforce and the self-respect of the individual worker could only be beneficial to the person using the services.

The GSCC managed to register all 120,000 social workers in England – despite many waiting until the deadline approached, seemingly more concerned about who would pay the £30 fee. The logic then would have been to register managers providing services for children and adults, cascading the process down, but it was decided to try first to register the care-at-home workforce.

The fledgling GSCC has not been without its faults. The decision in 2004, following a health select committee inquiry, to attempt to register care-at-home workers was seriously flawed and doomed, given that this was the most volatile workforce, working for multiple employers and changing jobs readily. The conflict that emerged between social care staff with regulated employers and those employed by an individual through a direct payment – who are not subject to the normal regulation applicable to an employee of a care home or agency and avoided any obligation to register with the social care regulator – presented an additional knotty problem of trying to balance safety and risk for people with some level of vulnerability.

The proposal last year by the Labour government to change the GSCC to the General Social Work Council and give up on 92% of the workforce (people who work in social care but are not qualified social workers) and pass them to the Health Professions Council (HPC) was bad enough. The move now by the new government to jettison the GSCC altogether and pass social workers to the HPC with no mention of the rest, is worse. How readily would we de-register 650,000 nurses? Yet, the numbers working in social care across England are vast – as many as work across all of the NHS – and the justification for a workforce regulator remains strong.

The GSCC was the result of a movement for social justice for more vulnerable people by placing greater value on the people who work with them. It should not be lost because of a wobbly beginning. A will to succeed is required.

The views here are not necessarily those of the other 1,499,999 people in social care. I don’t know their take on the culling of the GSCC, but nor does anyone else. No one has asked them.

• Nick Johnson is chief executive of the Social Care Association.